So a couple of weeks ago, we firmly established that Lucy loves horror movies. And it’s almost Halloween, so I think I want to build on this theme- specifically by exploring Lilith, which I’m seriously loving on right now (thank you, full 5th House by transit with natal asteroid Lilith in it). I’ve been using several different references to understand the exact differences between asteroid Lilith and Black Moon Lilith, chiefly Marina’s excellent 8th House/Lilith-centric blog, and I also found a great resource in Aquamoonlight Astrology. There I learned that even though asteroid Lilith and Black Moon Lilith are different bodies, they have roughly the same connotation- Lilith energy symbolizes a “dark side we prefer not to acknowledge… a subtle refusal to see what part we may have played in some unpleasant drama of our lives.” And when I read that, I thought, “ZOMG, that’s EXACTLY what that movie A Tale of Two Sisters is about!” So I forced myself to watch it again (with the light on this time, well before bedtime), and now, in the spirit of upcoming Halloween, I present you with another astro-film-critique.
A Tale of Two Sisters by Ji-woon Kim was one of the first Asian horror films that started that whole trend of “let’s do mediocre American remakes of incredible Asian horror, that all have to feature a female specter with long matted hair.” It’s based on a classic Korean folktale called “Rose Flower and Red Lotus” about two sisters who exact revenge on their evil stepmother from beyond the grave. Looking at the poster, you might imagine (as I initially did) a gratuitous splatterfest. Surprisingly, there’s about *thismuch* actual violence in it; the focus is really on the very Lilith-esque theme of how frightening one’s own psyche can actually be. I’ll do a synopsis of the film, which may seem long, but it’s pretty necessary to understand how Lilith features so prominently in this story. (My critique contains spoilers. But don’t let that stop you from watching the actual movie, because it’s a-MA-zing. And unlike a lot of films, it actually improves with multiple viewings.)
Sisters Su-mi and Su-yeon return home with their father after being in the hospital following the death of their mother. Su-mi, presumably the elder sister, is the more outgoing and aggressive one; younger Su-yeon is timid and barely speaks at all. The sisters are greeted by their cold and abusive stepmother; Su-yeon appears to be afraid of her. That night, Su-yeon wakes up and sees someone (or something) coming into her room. She goes to Su-mi’s room, where her sister comforts her and agrees that the house is strange; Su-mi promises that she will always be there for her sister, and they fall asleep in each other’s arms. Early the next morning, Su-mi awakens from a nightmare of running in the woods and a bloody hand grabbing her. She is realizing it was just a dream when she suddenly catches sight of something crawling at the foot of her bed, and is horrified to see the shape of a ghostly-looking woman rise up into the air, with her head limp as if her neck is broken, until she is right over Su-mi, at which point blood pours down her legs and a hand reaches out from under her dress. Su-mi wakes up for real this time, only to find that she and Su-yeon have begun their periods- and oddly, so has their stepmother. Later that day, Su-mi and Su-yeon look at pictures of their deceased mother, and see that their stepmother appears in later pictures, in a nurse’s uniform; it is at this point that Su-mi notices bruises on Su-yeon’s arms, and immediately accuses the stepmother. The father finds Su-mi upset and tries to talk to her, but she is indignant and tells him that “from now on… [you are] responsible for it all.” That night, the girls’ uncle and his wife come for dinner, which is cut short when the uncle’s wife has a violent seizure. On their way home, she tells her husband that she saw a girl under the kitchen sink. At the house, the stepmother hears a sound in the kitchen and goes to investigate; in her peripheral vision she sees a girl in a green dress sitting at the dining room table, and when she looks down again, a bloody hand shoots out from under the sink and grabs her. Frantic, she tries to tell the girls’ father that strange things have been happening in the house since the girls came home, but the father tells her not to say stupid things and gives her pills to calm down.
Late that night, the stepmother finds her pet bird dead in Su-yeon’s bed, which is just as much of a shock to Su-yeon; furious, the stepmother locks Su-yeon in her wardrobe and ignores her screams. Su-mi hears her sister’s cries and lets her out, apologizing that she could not protect her. Su-mi, hysterical, tells her father that the stepmother keeps hurting Su-yeon; her father tells her to stop, because Su-yeon is dead. Su-yeon’s image begins to shake, and she screams. The father is seen on the phone with someone, telling them to come tomorrow because he “can’t do it alone and she’s getting worse.” The next morning, Su-mi thinks she sees her stepmother dragging a bloody bag through the house and beating it with a poker. As Su-mi attempts to free her sister, a violent struggle ensues between her and her stepmother, and she is rendered unconscious.
Su-mi confronts her stepmother
When Su-mi regains consciousness, her stepmother is sitting over her. The stepmother asks her, “Don’t you get it yet?… Remember when I said, ‘You’ll regret it someday’?… You want to forget something… but you never can… and it follows you around like a ghost.” As the stepmother is about to kill Su-mi, the father suddenly comes in- but all he sees are a groggy Su-mi and a bloody bag with a doll in it. He goes to get her some pills, and when he returns, the stepmother is sitting on the couch instead of Su-mi. She asks where Su-mi is, and the father tells her to stop this, because he is sick of it. The doorbell rings, and the father goes to answer it. The stepmother looks up and gasps in horror as someone comes into the room: it is herself, looking sympathetic and concerned. The camera rotates back to show Su-mi sitting on the couch.
Su-mi has a multiple personality disorder, and she has been acting as herself, her stepmother, and her sister. She remembers that she was the one beating the doll in the bag, she killed the pet bird, and she exited the car alone when she returned home from the hospital at the beginning of the film. The father and stepmother return Su-mi to the hospital, where Su-mi begins to remember what she was trying to forget. When her and Su-yeon’s real mother was alive, she was very ill (and she looked quite a lot like the ghostly woman from Su-mi’s nightmare), and the stepmother was her nurse. The sisters noticed that their father and future stepmother seemed to be flirting, and the stepmother was very mean to Su-yeon. At the house, the stepmother, apparently remembering as well, hears a noise upstairs. She goes to Su-yeon’s room, where she turns on the light just in time to see something darting out the window. When she opens the shades to see, the door slams shut and she is trapped in the room. The wardrobe doors open, and a ghostly woman slides out, and a scream is heard from inside the house. Back at the hospital, Su-mi’s flashback continues. Su-yeon woke up in her room one day to find that their mother, probably depressed over her worsening condition and the apparent attraction between her husband and her nurse, had hanged herself in Su-yeon’s wardrobe. As Su-yeon struggled to pull her mother’s body out, she accidentally pulled the wardrobe down, crushing herself underneath it. The stepmother heard the wardrobe fall, went into the room, and saw Su-yeon struggling, but ran out. As she changed her mind and was about to go in and help Su-yeon, Su-mi came out of her room, unaware that there had just been an accident, and told the stepmother to stay out of their lives. The stepmother told her (which Su-mi recalled during their final fight), “You might regret this moment. Keep that in mind.” During this interchange, Su-yeon weakly whispered, “Help me, Su-mi,” before she died. Su-mi, still angry at her stepmother, went out of the house, presumably not finding out about her sister’s death until later that day.
The Lilith symbols in this story are strikingly clear, and not just because it’s a story about girls and mothers. Lilith energy is present in both genders, as sort of a foil to the archetype of the mother represented by the Moon. Where the Moon shows the deepest place we can be hurt, Lilith shows the ways in which we can actually hurt others, a dark part of us that not everyone likes to admit they have. Even when we have not actually done anything to anyone, our guilt can escalate to make us feel totally responsible- and in the subconscious mind, it doesn’t matter what the truth is; it hurts all the same. Children who blame themselves when their parents are divorcing, people who narrowly escape fatal accidents and think, “If only it had been me getting into that car…”, not to mention people who actually have done wrong by others and only come around to realize it later- all territory of Lilith. In A Tale of Two Sisters, Su-mi’s guilt has extreme consequences. Because she subconsciously believes that she is responsible for her sister’s death (by unknowingly delaying help), Su-mi internalizes the most horrible parts of her stepmother, who was truly responsible for letting Su-yeon die. She also internalizes the weakest and most timid parts of her sister, whom she failed to protect as she had promised. As the stepmother, the Lilith aspect, Su-mi is free to act out all the rage she feels over the deaths of her mother and sister (in the form of brutalizing her “sister” in the wardrobe, beating the doll, killing the bird), and further, her anger at herself for her perceived part in the tragedy (when the stepmother aspect tells her, “I’m the only one you can call Mother now, whether you like it or not”; on some level, that is all Su-mi feels she deserves). When she acts as the stepmother, she can punish herself for the fact that she has no “right” to feel the pain she does. However, as her sister, the victimized Moon aspect, Su-mi can indulge in a vulnerability she could never consciously allow herself. When she acts as her sister, she reminds herself that she is still hurting, that she needs to be cared for, and it’s easier to transfer that nurturing onto what she imagines to be her sister rather than give it to herself. Reminders of her real mother, intangibly in her nightmares and tangibly in her sudden onset of menstruation, are her subconscious attempt to fuse the two extremes of Stepmother and Sister, of Lilith and the Moon, to come to terms with them, release the trauma, and grow up as normally as she can manage. But it’s not easy. Her realization that Su-yeon is a construct of her subconscious literally shakes her, and her attempt to deconstruct her internalization of her stepmother is similarly a literal fight. Furthermore, the fact that all of these manifestations are subconscious allow Su-mi to maintain a bearable boundary between herself and her father, at whom she is still furious for his apparent obtuseness and inability to take any blame or feel any grief at what has happened.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but to me, A Tale of Two Sisters is a valuable lesson about trauma, about what Lilith has to offer but what most of us are too afraid to accept. There is a staggeringly large continuum of emotions that occur with trauma, and it’s difficult to stomach the more painful, violent and angry sides of that continuum because for the most part we suppress them. We don’t want to stomach them. We don’t even want to look at them. But they will show up eventually. Shirley Soffer is always saying that “you can either be a victim or a survivor”; she jokes that she once said this to her son and he replied, “I don’t want to be either, I want to be a perpetrator.” There is truth in that statement. Although victim and survivor are more popular “phenotypes” of trauma, a good amount of perpetrating takes place as well- towards ourselves, when we say, “I should be over this by now,” or “I can’t believe I’m still upset about this when much worse things have happened to other people,” or “I deserved for this to happen.” The sooner we can acknowledge the equal validity of our sadness, our vulnerability, and our anger, the sooner we integrate them- and the sooner the memory of the trauma becomes bearable, and in fact strengthens us.
While you’re thinking about that, I am now going to watch some MST3K. (I re-viewed A Tale of Two Sisters, and I just spent four hours reading and writing about it. I think I’ve fulfilled my Lilith quotient for the day. After all, I do have to sleep at some point.)
